Here we provide background information about the Festival itself and about its island setting. The Festival is an ideal time to visit Orkney, to see more of the islands and their wealth of history, archaeology and natural beauty. The Festival programme includes outings with expert guidance, talks with new insights, and an opportunity to meet many people, local and visiting. There are also opportunities to sample Orkney food and drink in what is overall a true Festival atmosphere.

FRONTIERS magazine
The new online magazine Frontiers
is now available. It is aimed to be
a magazine in its own right,
highlighting stories about science
and people, with a wide range of
contributors and a high
quality of design.

You can get more information about the Festival in a variety of ways, and you can also contact us direct.

Pepperwort and Parsley, Beeswax and Fulmar Oil

Mary Beith was known as a lecturer and researcher of great clarity on the traditional medicines of the Highlands. Through her newspaper and magazine articles, her book Healing Threads, and her contributions to conferences and universities, she looked below the surface to reveal a systematic body of knowledge in the Highlands of the past, expressed in those times in training and professional contact and bodies of medieval manuscripts, and laid the foundations for a fresh research approach.

She had previously worked as a journalist in situations requiring courage and self-reliance, and she won an award for her exposure of the “smoking beagles” scandal and reported from Northern Ireland in difficult times. She spoke in the second Orkney Science Festival in 1992, and twenty-five years on, the Festival paid tribute to her in a Memorial Lecture. It was given by ethnobotanical researcher Anna Canning, who has a degree in herbal medicine from Napier University and much experience in the study of plants and traditional remedies and the insights that can be provided by modern scientific studies.